Tina Folsom's Books

Saturday, February 19, 2011

I'm currently promoting A Touch of Greek on Barnes & Noble with the special price of $1.99.

Don't have a Nook? No problem - purchase the e-book at B&N, forward me the email receipt B&N sends you ( tina (at) tinawritesromance.com -- no spaces), and let me know what format you would like the book in: Kindle, Sony, or pdf, and I will email it to you.

Monday, February 14, 2011

After a great Saturday meeting with my RWA-sisters in Berkeley (RWA stands for Romance Writers of America), where lots of them asked me again how I manage to sell my books so well on Amazon Kindle, I kind of got curious to how many other romance authors are doing well without the backing of a publisher behind them.

So, I looked through the Amazon Bestseller lists today to see which self-published authors are in there (for this purpose I'm only looking in the "paid" bestsellers, excluding all those freebies).

28 novels within the Top 100 Kindle Romances were written by Indie Authors and self-published, with one indie author (we all know her name: Amanda Hocking) having 9 titles in the top 100 romances. She's followed by Heather Killogh-Walden with four titles and H.P. Mallory with three titles.

How is this even possible?

I've read several of those romances, and the ones I've read are damn good books (Monique Martin & HP Mallory in particular).

Price: most of those 28 titles are priced extremely low: $0.99 - $2.99. Only one book out of the 28 was priced as high as $3.99 which by any stretch is still much lower than what the NY publishers price their e-books at.

Most book covers look intriguing and professional - in fact so much so that unless I recognized the author's name I had to look at the detail page to find if the author had a "proper" publisher or was self-published.

Will we see more indies break into the bestseller lists? I sure hope so. For one, I'd love to be in there too. Yes, you heard right, even though I sold over 27,000 books across all my titles in January alone, I haven't quite made it into the top 100 romances yet. I am, however, ranking in the paranormal romance sub-genre with five of my books.

And my first book in the Scanguards Vampires series, Samson's Lovely Mortal, is inching closer to the top 100 romances. At present, it hovers around the top 600 Kindle books. To make the top 100 romances on Amazon, I'd have to get around the 400 overall on Kindle. But I know that's a tough nut to crack: my book is priced at $4.99 - still well below what traditionally published vampire romances cost, but above what people seem to be willing to pay for an indie author at present.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Thanks to all for helping me choose a new cover for A Touch of Greek. The race was neck to neck for a while between cover #3 and cover #1, but in the end #1 won out. The little Greek God in the corner will be carried through all four books in the series.

And now to the winner:

Janice O'Rourke (email entry) has won a Tina Folsom e-book of her choice.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The fabulous Elaina Lee has designed a wonderful new cover for my Out of Olympus (Greek God) romance A Touch of Greek. This is book 1 in the series.

However, I had Elaina do three different mock-ups and am torn on which one to choose. So, please have a look at the three covers below, vote for one of them in the comment section and, if you want to be entered into a draw to get a Tina Folsom e-book of your choice, please either leave your email address in the comment section (or email me at tina at tinawritesromance.com to provide me with your email if you don't want to leave it in the comment section). The winner will be drawn on Friday, Feb 11 at 9am PST.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Today I'd like to share a couple of 1-star reviews I received yesterday: one for Gabriel's Mate and one for Venice Vampyr. I just wanted to drive my point home again: my novels are not for the faint of heart - and the warnings on the books' descriptions say as much! Yet, people who clearly can't take the graphic nature of my sex scenes keep on buying them. Is it so that they can complain about them later?

So here are the reviews. Both are from the same reader who clearly took issue with the sexual nature of my books.

Review for Gabriel's Mate (verbatim - so don't blame me for the typos):
Disgraceful Novel
This novel was absoluetly horrible. Its explict scenes were over bearing and sick! I was expecting a romance novel not some tripple X book! And the worse part is that I was dumb enough to buy 2 books by Tina Folsom. How could this woman come up with something as disgusting as this! All I am is saying to eager readers looking for a good romance novel, bypass this book and this author as a whole. This is a disgrace to literature. Actually this is not even literature at all.

Review for Venice Vampyr (word for word):
DISGUSTING!!!!
This book was sick and a disgrace it is completly disgusting and perverse! Who would write thia sort of thing? Absoluetly reckless! Poor decision to write this on Tina Folsoms part. She should be ashamed.

And yes, I should be ashamed of myself - right after I stop laughing. Because by calling my books triple X, this reader is only driving up my sales. And no, I'm not looking to win a Pulitzer prize - I write to entertain people.

For all of you who do enjoy a steamy read, you know where to buy my books: Barnes & Noble and Amazon

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

I had some comments from readers that they wanted the series numbers on the books, but I decided not to put them on the covers. However, I'm adding the series # to the title on the product page of the various retailers, so it's immediately clear which book number it is. On Amazon, this will show up shortly. Barnes & Noble actually already shows the series numbers when you look in the detailed information.

It will take a few weeks for this cover to be placed on the paperback version of the book though.

For Samson's cover I kept Jimmy Thomas as my model since I really feel that he looks like Samson. Elaina Lee did the cover. Thanks Elaina!